This document discusses how to get the most out of a disaster recovery infrastructure using Active Data Guard. It describes traditional disaster recovery solutions, an overview of Active Data Guard, how to enable it using SQL*Plus or the Data Guard Broker. Active Data Guard allows read-only operations and backups to be offloaded to the standby site. A customer case study shows how Active Data Guard was used to add high availability to a manufacturing company's Oracle database, offloading reporting to the standby site for better primary site performance.